February monthly round-up


Hope you're doing well. This month I posted 2 summaries and 2 blog posts.

Book summaries

  • The Art of Learning by Joshua Waitzkin (24 mins) — Waitzkin won 8 National Championships in Chess and later became a world champion in Tai Chi Push Hands. This is partly a memoir and partly a self-improvement book, explaining the principles that helped him succeed.
  • The Book of Why by Judea Pearl and Dana McKenzie (20 mins) — explains how statisticians misunderstood causality for a long time and how causal models can help us to better understand and control the world around us. A pretty complex but fascinating book.

Blog posts

Both blog posts this month are offshoots from The Book of Why. They can largely be read as standalone pieces, but the causal diagrams may be a bit confusing.

I'm currently working on a summary for Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein. While I don't usually pay close attention to the news, the events over the past month have made me want to try and better understand US politics. So you can look forward to that in a week or two.

Thanks and until next time,

To Summarise

ToSummarise.com

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My latest summary is for A Hacker’s Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society’s Rules, and How to Bend them Back by security expert Bruce Schneier. It's an interesting look at the systems around us through the lens of hacking. As usual, the key takeaways are below, and you can find the full summary by clicking the link above. KEY TAKEAWAYS A hack is an activity allowed by the system that subverts the goal or intent of the system. Hacks exploit a vulnerability in the system to advance the hacker’s...

If, like me, you’ve been watching US politics recently and wondering how it got to be the way it is, you might find my latest summary for Why We’re Polarized by Ezra Klein to be an enlightening read. As usual, the key takeaways are below, and you can find the full summary by clicking the link above. KEY TAKEAWAYS America has polarized significantly over the past few decades: Political polarization has increased. Swing voters who are genuinely persuadable are going extinct. Polarization by...

This summary of The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect by Judea Pearl and Dana McKenzie explains how causal models can help us to better understand and control the world around us. This was a difficult one and I'm not sure how intelligible the key takeaways alone will be, as the diagrams are crucial to this book. Nevertheless, as usual I've set them out below and you can find the full summary (with diagrams) by clicking the link above. KEY TAKEAWAYS Statisticians woefully...